RACE AND RACISM

Ideas about race, so commonplace in the early twenty-first century, emerged in very specific historical settings. Concepts of race changed remarkably over time, and from place to place. The use of the word race began to appear in English in the sixteenth century, but its usage was unusual and infrequent, and even then might refer to all kinds of groups. It is widely accepted that modern concepts of race derived essentially from the years of Enlightenment thinking in the eighteenth century. Ideas about racism (largely a twentieth-century phenomenon) were similarly prone to change and variation across time and place.

eighteenth-century debates

Although theories about race flowered, and became most influential, in the nineteenth century, their origins are to be found in the previous century, and in the varied efforts to comprehend the origins of humankind. What gave the eighteenth-century debates such a sharp edge was their relevance for Europe's dealings with the wider world. Indeed it was the encounters with an obviously amazing variety of human types, societies, and people as Europeans traveled, traded, and colonized that formed the basis both for the inspiration and the data for the debate and writing about the nature of humankind. There had been observations about the distinctions between people in any number of historical settings. But it is really only since the early nineteenth century that Europeans (and then Americans) turned to the concept of race as the key concept for the categorization of human beings.

There were a number of major themes to eighteenth-century discussions of race. First, a race was seen to have a fixed set of characteristics that remained unchanged by outside conditions. Second, it was argued that a key feature of this racial typology was mental/intellectual, and that these features were not the same from one race to another (that is, some races were more intelligent or brighter than others). Third, it was argued that intellectual capacity revealed itself by outward physical characteristics: it was possible to tell, by physical appearance, the nature (and limitations) of a person's (or a group's) intellectual capacities. Thus were complex arguments about race simplified, over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, into relatively simple rules of thumb that gained remarkably widespread acceptance (through print and formal education) to become popular ideas that had a potency of their own. Thus did abstract literary and intellectual debates of the eighteenth century pass directly (if clumsily) into popular politics of the early twentieth century.

The early polarity of division, between Christians and pagans, gave way to ever more complicated divisions of humans, partly because the complexities of humanity were revealed as Europeans encroached on distant peoples, and partly as European intellectual traditions of philosophy and natural science also changed. The "discoveries" of the world's varied peoples pushed scholars toward new taxonomies (classifications). Inevitably, Western scholars inherited a powerful biblical tradition that explained the origins of humankind in relatively simple terms (via Adam and Eve). Inevitably too, these early analysts sought to strike a balance between the simple biblical explanation of human origins, and the geographic complexity of the world currently unfolding before them. In the process a string of new classifications emerged—most notably from the Swedish botanist Linnaeus (Carl von Linné; 1707–1778), and the German zoologist and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840)—that were inherited and used by subsequent scholars. But the core belief was that environment shaped human differences, whatever term was used to describe those differences. Different climatic regions produced different human types, which in their turn created very different social forms and structures. More troubling, because of its obvious theological consequences, was the emergence of polygenism; that is, the idea that humanity did not spring from a single point of creation. But to promote such a case was to confront the biblical argument of the origins of humans through Adam.

All commentators on the origins of humankind had to wrestle with the extraordinary diversity and geographic spread of humanity. How had humankind spread itself so widely across the surface of the earth? Perhaps the most influential writer who tackled the origins of humankind was Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707–1788), whose massive work (running to forty-four volumes) sought to explain human features (color, appearance, size) in terms of environment. Transplant people around the globe and they would, he argued, adapt to local physical conditions. The problem however was that there was a growing volume of data that simply refuted such claims. There were for example sizable black minorities in Europe by the mid-eighteenth century that simply did not grow paler the longer they stayed in northern Europe. Equally, whites migrating to the tropics did not (if they survived) take on the physical features of local peoples. The clear problem was how to explain the diversity of humankind. For all Buffon's intellectual influence (a string of notable authors picked up and expanded his ideas), the human and anthropological evidence simply contradicted his case. A number of scholars wrestled with the concept of the human diversity, and by the late eighteenth century a number of scholars had begun to use the word race to describe the different groups they claimed to have identified.

race as a dominant category of classification

From the late eighteenth century the idea of "race" emerged as a dominant category in the classification of humankind. Science, medicine, and early anthropology (not fully developed until the nineteenth century) turned to race. But it also spilled over into popular usage and custom, both as part of the popular spoken vernacular and as an expression of popular opinion.

Atlantic slave empires

One critical element in this convergence of intellectual and popular usage of race stemmed directly from the emergence and significance of the Atlantic slave empires. From the mid-sixteenth century onward, especially after the development of the sugar plantations in Brazil and then the Caribbean, Europeans turned to Africa for slave labor. This in itself was a curiosity: why shift boatloads of Africans across the Atlantic to produce tropical staples for distant societies in western Europe? Moreover it was doubly curious in that slavery in Europe had effectively ended at the very period Europeans turned to Africa for slaves. Unable to persuade indigenous Indians to work in their new settlements, and incapable of securing adequate supplies of European settlers (free or indentured), colonists and their metropolitan backers turned to Africa. African slaves were already being used in the newly settled Atlantic islands. It seemed a natural step to transplant African slave labor into the Americas. The initial trickle became a flood after the establishment of the sugar plantations.

By the late eighteenth century, the Atlantic slave trade (now dominated by the British) ferried tens of thousands of Africans across the Atlantic every year. It is now known that some twelve million Africans were loaded onto the Atlantic slave ships, and about ten and half million landed in the Americas. Slavery was not, of course, unique to these newly created societies in the Americas. But what distinguished them—what made them unique—was their racial basis. At the height of the slave empires, to be black was to be a slave: to be a slave was to be black. Moreover this form of slavery hinged on the reduction of the African to the status of object/thing/chattel. Black humanity was, via the Atlantic slave trade, reduced to the level of thing.

Objectifying the African

This may, at first sight appear to be simply an accidental consequence of trade and colonization. In fact the reduction of one branch of humanity—African—to the status of property was consciously and deliberately shaped and orchestrated by metropolitan commercial and political interests. British laws, for example, specifically designated Africans as things in acts of Parliament governing the slave trade. Colonial legislation regulating government in the slave colonies, even English courts, designated Africans as items of trade—as things. As early as 1677 the English solicitor-general declared that "Negroes ought to be esteemed goods and commodities within the Acts of Trade and Navigation."

There were numerous occasions when English law and lawyers confirmed the property status of black people. In 1749 Philip Yorke, Lord Hardwicke, declared that slaves in England were "as much property as any other thing." Thus even before the intellectual debate about lack of humanity had begun to focus on race as a category, colonizing nations had created a special category for Africans and their descendants: The black was a thing, a nonhuman.

Implications for ideas of race

There was, of course, an abundance of evidence to the contrary. And the very idea of the black as a thing posed a serious intellectual challenge to a broadly based cultural acceptance of the African as Homo sapiens. Equally, there were powerful voices, growing in numbers and stridency by the late eighteenth century, that spoke out against the relegation of the black to the level of thing. Yet the critical fact remains indisputable. In order to tap the prosperity of the Americas, and to enhance the well-being both of the colonizing peoples and of their metropolitan nations, Europeans had created a special status for millions of humans. They had created a new form of slavery for their economic self-interest: a highly racialized form of slavery. Not surprisingly, this peculiar institution—so fundamental to life across swathes of the Americas until the mid-nineteenth century—had far-reaching consequences for the emergence of the debate about race, and for the development of a racism that had recognizably modern features. Stated simply, white society treated and viewed black humanity as a deeply inferior subset of humankind. The practical, intellectual, and popular consequences of black slavery were ubiquitous and pervasive.

What is odd is how this central fact—with consequences for four continents over more than four centuries, has rarely been recognized as a critical issue in the evolution of attitudes toward race in these years. It is worth asking the simple question: is it remotely possible that so prolonged a process of dehumanization for so many people (and scattered over such huge expanses of the globe) could not have shaped attitudes about race? The fundamental inspiration behind the Atlantic slave system was economic of course. But it came to be authorized and justified, in law, economic custom, and popular convention—and eventually in popular culture—in racial terms. Only black people could be slaves in the Atlantic system.

As part of the process of justification, commentators began to attribute to blacks "slavish" characteristics: ignorance, sloth, stupidity, duplicity, and mendacity—these and other vices were imputed to blacks as basic racial features that only the constraints of slavery could overcome. Without slavery, blacks would simply revert to their "natural" African vices and would prove of no value to society. Thus did slavery and all its punitive habits come to be explained and justified in terms of race. Blacks were of no economic use unless marshaled, regulated, and controlled by the repressions of slavery. What slavery did was to mark out millions of human beings (blacks) for special categorization. And in the process there was a marked slippage in definitions. The simple process of describing all black people as a type—a race—changed into something quite different: an explanation of human behavior by reference to race. What Atlantic slavery achieved was to lay the secure foundations for a form of racism. And that racism was to flourish, in changed and quite different circumstances, long after slavery itself had been abolished.

the spread of "racism"

This relegation of black humanity to a deeply inferior level was confirmed by a range of popular cultural expressions: cartoons, prints, newspapers, tracts—all and more described black humanity in grotesque, often animal-like, terms. What compounded this tradition was the work of men closely linked to the slave system, notably the planters and their hired scribes intent on maintaining the slave as an item of property and keen to deflect any hint of black equality. And it was at this point—in the increasingly frenetic late-eighteenth-century debate about black humanity (prompted by the early abolitionist movement), that the pro-slavery lobby began to speak of blacks as a "race." Until roughly 1750 race had been used simply as a classification—a type. But the abolitionist-plutocratic debate was crucial in shifting the meaning of the word. Henceforth race came to mean a group of people whose differences lay in their physical features—their skin, color, shapes. It was possible henceforth to spot a person's race simply by looking at them (though it is also true that an increasing trend toward human mixing, as peoples moved and settled around the globe, confused this pattern still further).

How this view of race spread and was made popular is a complex story, bound up with the emergence of a new culture of print, the transformation of urban life and the emergence, eventually, of widespread literacy. Equally, the establishment of popular education, in western Europe and North America, confirmed and extended the popular and scientific views of race by entering the classroom. Racism in a recognizably modern sense began to make itself felt both as an intellectual typology and as a popular concept.

Slavery left a distinct racial legacy. It was based on the proposition (however obviously flawed) that black people were things: chattels and objects of trade. Abolitionists' first task was to establish the humanity of slaves ("Am I not a man and a brother?"). But the theme persisted well into the nineteenth century. In the confused and widening debate about slavery (and the justifications for and against) the blackness of humanity was a central issue. But what made the older views about black inequality even more virulent was the emergence of new sciences that sought to discover categories of humans, and to provide a new scientific basis for that categorization.

The scientific urge to seek distinctions among humans concentrated not merely on color of course: shape, size, outward physical features (notably of the head), all and more were recruited to the task. But color remained the most obvious and immutable distinction. It was a protracted and confused process, but the outcome was a clear school of science, promoted by early anthropology and later social sciences, that claimed to explain human differences in racial terms. Not surprisingly, it led to a league table of humanity—with whites at the top. Blacks—inheriting the status endured by slaves in earlier centuries—were consigned to the lowest reaches of humankind.

There were also other forces at work, notably the emergence of powerful, popular attachments to racial feeling. Propagated by different but converging forces, popular racism equally consigned black humanity to the lowest rungs of humanity. One key explanation was the disappointment felt with the results of abolition. The high expectations of abolitionists, in the Caribbean and North America, that freed slaves would quickly take their place as a free and prospering peasantry, were soon disappointed. The poverty and continuing deprivation of former slaves in the Caribbean islands and in the U.S. South (in both cases, they were generally denied access to the land, education, and facilities required to improve themselves) confirmed the worst accusations of the pro-slavery lobby that blacks could never rise from the humblest of stations. They were, in effect, doomed to exist as the simple helots or serfs of superior peoples. Even in South America, where there had long been a powerful tradition of racial mixing, new waves of European immigration saw a hardening of local racial distinctions, and especially of the separation of black and white, in order to enhance and preserve the status of the more recently arrived white immigrants.

The language of race became hugely popular and widespread. Indeed it was so pervasive that it was applied, by the late nineteenth century, to much wider areas of society than previously. "Race" was thought a suitable category to describe a host of contemporary social structures. The British for example used race in the most casual and commonplace fashion: they called themselves "an island race" and even the lower orders of the British people (poor, urban, and industrial) were described as a "race" or a "race apart." In Europe as a whole, by the end of the nineteenth century, race had taken on an entirely new and more pervasive meaning. Germans viewed themselves as a national race, and scientists wrestled with the idea that Europeans might best be divided into racial groupings. What is remarkable about all this is the speed with which race became the widely and popularly accepted means of social categorizing and description. Race was no longer simply a tool used by social and natural scientists. It had taken on an entrenched and popular dimension.

It was greatly assisted by the rise of two related issues: mass education and literacy, and the urge to empire. The creation of modern empires (especially in Africa), the political debate in Europe about empire, and the classroom discussion of empire and of the wider world confirmed many of these new and simplistic views of race. What better way of confirming the superiority of the white person than pointing to the imperial maps in European classrooms and letting the evidence speak for itself? Maps seemed to confirm that the white world had triumphed easily and swiftly over the nonwhite world, and offered positive proof, it was argued, of the superiority/inferiority that lay at the heart of the whole process.

Such views were embedded at the heart of the literature to which generations of schoolchildren were exposed before 1914. Textbooks, maps, and lessons from teachers who were themselves steeped in the rhetoric of race became the basic educational diet of millions of schoolchildren. The lessons of history, geography, and even literature were harnessed to the task of expounding a racial view of the world that saw white society at the top and black society at the bottom (wherever one looked). It was furthermore a view confirmed by popular culture: by the hugely influential popular newspapers and print culture of the late nineteenth century. Children's books, comics, and magazines extolled the virtues of empire, and of the bravery of white men bringing the benefits of empire to the less developed corners of the globe. Even the contemporary cult of popular games (the very games that dominate the social landscape to this day) had a role in this process: they were training grounds for the perfection of imperial and military qualities, and physical expressions of the very process of racial/national superiority. No one thought—or imagined—that one day (not far hence) those very games would be usurped by the subject people to whom they were introduced, and those same people one day might even beat their masters at their own games. What happened to the old theories of superiority when black men beat white men at football, cricket, boxing, and track and field?

The strength of popular racism can be seen in most forms of early twentieth century popular culture: in print, of course, and in cartoons and music—especially in music halls and vaudeville (where "blacking-up" was a peculiar variant of the wider theme). It passed directly from this tradition into the early day of cinema and silent movies. Thus did the racism of the few—of "scientists"—become disseminated among millions of people, on both sides of the Atlantic in the years before World War I.

assessment

This account is, inevitably, a shortened account of what is a hugely complex and confusing story. But the basic point is simple enough. On the eve of World War I millions of people, throughout Europe and North America (and even wider afield) believed (and expressed) views about race that had, not long before, been the preserve of a small educated minority. The racism of the early twentieth century was a unique phenomenon. It was not, like the racial views of the era of slavery, a debate among relatively small numbers of interested parties and observers. It had become enormously popular and pervasive. It also had the potential to become a major political force. And that is exactly what happened. Scientific ideas about race were used by political groups, from the late nineteenth century onward, to develop a political case that hinged on concepts of racial superiority. This was transformed, in the 1920s and 1930s into its most virulent form, in the rise of fascism: a highly racialized philosophy that was to convulse Europe until 1945.

The line of descent between racial views in the eighteenth century and the ideological conflicts of twentieth century Europe may seem tenuous. In fact they were direct and unbroken. Views about race, and the emergence of modern racism, passed from the world of the slaveholder to the architects of twentieth century racial superiority. Naturally enough, the process, spread over such a long period (years marked by unprecedented social, economic, and demographic change) was complex and confusing. Yet there are recognizable elements from beginning to end. The categorization of humankind into racial groups, identified by outward appearances (color most notably) was perhaps the most striking and immutable legacy that passed from the world of racialized slavery in the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. At one level, the fact that racism, in all its varied and fluctuating forms, survives, is an indirect testimony to the persistence and durability of the ideas that underpinned the slave system in a long-distant era. It is as if the sins of the fathers continue to trouble descendants down to the present day.

See alsoAnti-Semitism; Chamberlain, Houston Stewart; Civilization, Concept of; Eugenics; Evolution; Imperialism; Slavery.

bibliography

Augstein, Hannah Franziska, ed. Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850. Bristol, U.K., 1996.

Back, Les, and John Solomos, eds. Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader. London, 2000.

Bulmer, Martin, and John Solomos, eds. Racism. Oxford, U.K., 1999.

Chaplin, Joyce E. "Race." In The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, edited by David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, 154–172. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K., 2002.

James Walvin